...Peel checked the NMRs’ cryogen levels and found that although the nitrogen needed topping off, the helium was still okay. Now the team had a decision to make: Keep the NMRs going, or discharge the magnets in a controlled manner and bring them up to room temperature.

As long as the school had access to liquid nitrogen, which it did, they could keep the instruments running. But just because they had liquid nitrogen didn’t mean they’d be able to get it to the NMRs. Without electricity, the elevators didn’t work. During that visit, the team used a cherry picker to lift a tank of liquid nitrogen to a terrace with access to the 500-MHz instrument, but that was a solution no one saw as safe or sustainable.

The team weighed its options. Discharging the magnets wasn’t a trivial operation. It would take some sort of power source—a car battery, for example. And without liquid helium on hand, they couldn’t be sure the magnets wouldn’t be damaged in the process.After talking with the National Guard troops on campus, the team learned it could have access to portable, gasoline-powered generators. These could be used sparingly to run the elevators to deliver the liquid nitrogen. This, they decided, was their best option....

And this conclusion for which we can all learn from:

The chemistry department didn’t suffer any extensive losses to research. The biology department and researchers at the medical school were not so lucky. McPherson says he didn’t even think the story of the NMR rescue was noteworthy until he learned that every other university in New Orleans with superconducting NMRs had lost their magnets to quenches.

As for lessons learned, the school now keeps a large stock of liquid nitrogen on hand during hurricane season, and it has a much more detailed emergency plan. Most faculty have an emergency contact number outside New Orleans and an additional e-mail account that’s not linked to Tulane.

Hardening facilities for natural disasters is probably not so high on folks' priority lists, but it definitely is worth some thought.

...That vivid memory illustrates another aspect of the problem: just as lab hours per calendar day (and perhaps also hours worked alone) are at their highest, one’s own experience is nowhere near at its peak. Graduate school is where chemists encounter a lot of reagents and procedures for the first time, and not all of these encounters will go smoothly. This is when one might find out, for example, just how remarkably air-sensitive trimethylaluminium is (if there isn’t a flame burning from the end of the syringe needle, the bottle has probably gone off), or just how long a large aqueous phosphorus oxychloride workup can sit around before it suddenly erupts all over the inside of a fume hood (several hours, damn it all)....

I'm reminded an episode of one of my favorite old shows "The Unit", where the youngest operator on the team grazes a senior operator in the arm during a training exercise. After giving Bob a thorough razzing, they congratulate him on reaching his "200th hour"* where he has "enough experience to be confident, enough to screw up real good."

It is a funny aspect of graduate school in chemistry where you're the least experienced, you work the most hours that you'll probably work during one's time in research chemistry and you're likely to be the least supervised you'll ever be (if you continue onto industrial bench chemistry.)

...He called a rare special session of the Legislature to approve the state’s share of the Scripps package — $310 million plus interest over 10 years — and won easy approval from the county government to spend more than $200 million. To make his case, he circulated a five-page economic impact study that said Florida could build a biotech economy every bit as impressive as the one that took decades to germinate in San Diego, only faster and bigger, with potential to add more than 40,000 jobs within 15 years of operation.

Twelve years later, those dreams have not come true.

Florida employed 27,611 people in biotech last year, according to the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity, or just 952 more people than it did in 2007, the last year for which the state has comparable data. Scripps accounts for many of those jobs, with a head count of 646 people in Florida.

The data do show a doubling in the number of biotech establishments. And Scripps says it has attracted $425 million in federal grants and donations.

But the promise of Florida’s investment was about a jobs bonanza from spinoff companies.

Bush was captivated by the Scripps headquarters in La Jolla, a tony San Diego suburb where 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney owns a home. The institute and its satellite offices are located along Torrey Pines Road, a verdant stretch connecting it to the famed golf course of the same name as well as sandstone coastal bluffs and the ocean. The biotech boom around Scripps is hard to miss. Science and medical companies dot the area.

Florida, meanwhile, remains an afterthought in the biotech world. No Florida city has cracked the annual list of top 10 biopharma clusters compiled by Genetic Engineering and Biotech News, an industry publication. Traditional powers including San Diego, Los Angeles and the Bay Area dominate the list...

First, does anyone who has experience in the Jupiter area disagree with the article's assessment? Is it too early in the game to make a call?

Second, this story allows me to tee off on a favorite hobbyhorse of mine, which is the quixotic attempt of local governments to get their cities/states into the biotech business. I personally think it's a tremendous money loser; the benefits only accrue to the lucky few scientists who are recruited in early, when there's a lot of government cash to hand out by the attendant politicians (who also benefit when they show up at ribbon cuttings.) The taxpayer is left with the bill. I think it's clear that to do this right, you need:

More than one world-class clinical research hospital

More than one world-class basic research university

More than one large pharma/biotech/medical device company with a major R&D center in the geographical area

Lots of available venture capital

Lots of available experienced scientists

An amenable business climate

(I'll bet items 1-3 are most important.)

Even the cities that do have these things (I'm looking at you, San Diego, RTP) have not done nearly as well in the last 20 years as San Francisco and Boston/Cambridge.

Monsanto was also quick to see the market opportunity. The company had grown with the production of 2,4-D and its descendant 2,4,5-T, which were then combined to produce Agent Orange to defoliate forest cover during the Vietnam War. In 1970, in an effort to come up with an even stronger plant killer, Monsanto chemist John E. Franz hit upon an herbicide called glyphosate, which was marketed under the trade name Roundup and had seen unmatched growth in broadleaf weed control in the agricultural industry. The only problem with Roundup: It was such an effective herbicide that farmers had to apply it carefully, spraying only early sprouting weeds, to avoid exterminating their crops.

Monsanto’s engineers set about searching for a gene that would allow crops to survive exposure to Roundup. They found it in the wastewater-treatment plant of one of their own glyphosate production plants in Louisiana, where workers had noticed a range of bacteria thriving despite exposure to Roundup—and one, under lab testing, displayed total immunity to glyphosate pesticides. By 1996, Monsanto had commercially introduced soybeans that had been genetically modified to resist glyphosate—what the company termed “Roundup Ready.”

I had no idea that some level of serendipity occurred to help this happen. "Fortune favors the prepared mind" and all of that. (Does anyone know if this is actually true?)

The article legitimately questions whether or not the FBI should be using the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act to track foreign nationals performing industrial espionage within the United States. It seems to me that the most ideal scenario would be a new set of laws granting surveillance powers to federal agencies that are tasked with preventing industrial espionage from other nations. But asking for new laws these days seems like asking for a pony*, so we're probably going to muddle through with what we have.

A good deal of a forensic chemist’s work is instrumental analysis, says Darrell Davis, laboratory director at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) South Central Laboratory in Dallas, Texas. Davis has been a forensic chemist for over 29 years with DEA, originally on the bench analyzing samples for the presence of controlled substances at the Southwest Laboratory in San Diego, and later managing the DEA lab in Dallas.

Davis says that the DEA’s work is “mostly analytical [chemistry], both qualitative and quantitative. “We not only identify the controlled substance and its constituents … We also quantitate the controlled substance to let the courts and special agents know how pure the sample is. For example, we might analyze a kilogram of a cocaine-like substance and determine that 80% of that weight is pure cocaine.”

In order to do these analyses, the chemists in Davis’ lab use mass spectrometry, infrared spectroscopy (IR), gas chromatography (GC), and liquid chromatography (LC). “We also use NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance] on the more complex types of samples.”

Torrance, CA: Medical Chemical Corporation has, once again, a production chemist opening.Interesting: Never seen an ad from "Commissioning Agents, Inc" before; they do a lot of regulatory-related work at API plants and the like, I believe.

A broader look: Monster, Careerbuilder, Indeed and USAjobs.gov show (respectively) "1000+",
652, 9518 and 15 positions for the search term "chemist." LinkedIn shows 768 positions for the job title "chemist", with 74 for "analytical chemist", 24 for "research chemist", 12 for "organic chemist", 4 for "synthetic chemist" and 3 for "medicinal chemist."

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in The Show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in The Show, however, it means you are a slob.

From the inbox, a respected correspondent has some interesting numbers to share on the data from the latest ACS ChemCensus. This information was written by the correspondent and edited for clarity and formatting by CJ:

The Census, conducted every 5 years, is sent to domestic ACS members that are not: students, internationally-based, emeritus, or over 70 years old. Of our ~current membership of 157,000, only 73,000 members were contacted for the ChemCensus. For those of us keeping score that is less than 50% of our membership (all numbers are rounded, 72977 was the actual number.)

The percentage of ACS members in academia is now at 38%, up from 24% in 2004. The percentage of Industry (manufacturing*) ACS members is 42%, down from 54% in 2004. The % in industry (non-manufacturing, govt and self employed) has remained relatively flat over the decade at 12%, 7% and 2% respectively.

The ChemCensus response was about 24,000, or ~33%.

ACS has an 84% retention rate; with a churn of ~25,000 members not renewing (a few hundred die every year). Half of that 25K is students, we are told.

The loss of industrial members is not particularly surprising, but is disappointing nonetheless. Here's hoping for a renaissance.

As part of a talented and multi-disciplinary team advancing an exciting new approach to oncology drug discovery and development, the successful candidate will participate in discovery synthetic chemistry efforts aimed at identifying and developing novel linkers, payloads and linker-drugs technologies for preclinical evaluation and clinical use. The successful candidate will have strong synthetic skills, outstanding attention to detail and excellent record keeping abilities.

Responsibilities:

Synthesize, purify and characterize biologically-active organic small molecules and linkers

Contribute to optimization and validation of synthetic routes applicable for cGMP manufacturing of linker-drugs on multigram scale

Maintain excellent experimental records for research and development efforts

Contribute to development and optimization of analytical characterization methods for linker-drugs.

Requirements:

BSc in Synthetic Organic Chemistry 2+ years of laboratory experience

Experience in multistep organic synthesis

Strong small molecule purification skills

Knowledge of common spectroscopic and analytical techniques (NMR, MS, HPLC)

Create a 2-3 minute video that conveys the value of Organic Division Membership.

Prizes: Five (5) Awards of up to $1,500 for travel reimbursement to the 2016 ACS Spring Meeting in San Diego. One prize will be awarded for each winning video submission–collaborating video creators will need to determine the funding split. If fewer than 5 submissions are received, the budgeted travel funding will be split among the entries according to the discretion of the Executive Committee of the Division of Organic Chemistry. One award will be granted to the video with the greatest number of page views. Additional award prize categories are dependent on the actual submissions and could include:

1. Most humorous
2. Most creative
3. Grand Jury Prize

Qualifying videos will be posted to the ACS DOC YouTube Channel (http://tinyurl.com/ORGNYouTube) for viewing by the public and judges.

San Bernardino, CA: California State University San Bernardino is looking for an assistant professor; "Specialization in bioanalytical chemistry, biomaterials chemistry, or environmental chemistry is desired." 60-70k offered.

Earlier this year, a University of California, Berkeley, first-year chemistry graduate student synthesized about 1 g of a diazonium perchlorate compound (R-N2+ClO4–) as part of an effort to explore the effect of the perchlorate ion on a reaction. Working at an open bench and wearing regular prescription eyeglasses, he was using a metal spatula to transfer the material out of a porcelain funnel when the compound exploded.

Porcelain fragments shattered the lenses of his glasses and lacerated his left cornea and his face. The student required surgery on his eye but was not permanently injured and is back in the lab.

He knew he was working with an explosive and followed appropriate safety measures for most of the experiment, but at the end, “he became a little complacent,” says the student’s adviser, chemistry professor F. Dean Toste. The student should have worn safety glasses and used a nonmetal spatula for the transfer.

Toste and UC Berkeley Office of Environment, Health & Safety Executive Director Mark Freiberg have worked together in the months following the accident to figure out what to do to try to prevent other similar events. “We look at it as systemic failure,” Freiberg says. “We’ve spent a lot of time with this student and others in the lab, trying to explore this incident and glean from it as much as we can about how our current, fairly extensive efforts to improve safety were ineffective in this instance...."

Back when we discussed this in June, I was a bit confused as to why the graduate student made as much as they did. 1 gram seems like a lot. Doesn't look like we got any answers on that question.

The issue of side-shields on prescription safety glasses seems pretty fundamental, though, and it doesn't seem like much progress has been made there, either:

...Following policies implemented in response to the [CJ's note: UC Regents'/LADA Sangji-related] agreement, the student injured at Berkeley had completed standardized safety training; received personal protective equipment (PPE) appropriate for his research, including eye protection; and signed that he’d read the relevant standard operating procedure (SOP) for the experiment that he was doing....

...Wearing regular prescription glasses may give people a sense that their eyes are protected, even when they’re not wearing safety glasses or goggles. To address that issue, the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry will now pay any costs for prescription safety eyewear not covered by a researcher’s insurance company....

There are two separate issues here. First, it's cynically amusing to me to see that the organization has all the paperwork lined up that says "we told you to do it correctly." While UC-Berkeley has been legally protected, somehow the student was still in their lab, using the wrong equipment, wearing the wrong PPE.

(I am beginning to think (only 8 years after the Great Recession) that "systemic failure" is organization-speak for "everyone's at fault, so no one's at fault.")

Secondly, I have a question about the massive, massive problem in both academia and industry of wearing prescription glasses as pseudo-safety glasses in the laboratory.* I bet you that we could walk into any chemistry laboratory within 100 yards to 50 miles of where you are sitting here reading this, and we'd find someone breaking this common sense rule. While I think Berkeley is being very gallant in picking up the difference in costs for prescription safety glasses, I think this is a paper solution, just like the SOPs. What can we do about it? Readers, any suggestions?

*As a young graduate student, I decided to transition from prescription glasses to contacts to avoid the temptation of wearing prescription glasses in the laboratory and thinking "I am still protected here." Any vanity on my part, or that I was single at the time is strictly coincidental.

Friday, August 21, 2015

"Troubleshooting that alarm fell to a rookie operator named Crystle Wise, a 53-year-old, dog-loving, Harley-Davidson-riding grandmother with electric blue eyes. By chance, Wise had chosen to take her break in a spot dubbed the “smoke shack”—between the control room and the pesticide tower. Wise, one of the latest hires in the plant’s recent wave of turnover, was still finishing her nine-month training period with DuPont. She donned her safety helmet and goggles and grabbed an oversized wrench. Then she crossed a covered passageway to the Lannate tower and opened a heavy metal door that led to a stairwell. She headed for a complex set of valves on the third floor, to clear the clog and relieve the stress on the pipes—and on the rest of the crew. What Wise didn’t know was that she was walking into a disaster."

I tend to agree with the "Swiss cheese" model of accident analysis - in this case, you can really watch the holes line up. More on this later.

Also, does anyone have a good article on the Tianjin incident? I know there's a lot of sodium cyanide in the destroyed warehouse, but that doesn't explain the initial explosion.

The fine prize: A 1 pound bag of hard candies, a certificate fit for framing, 50 of the finest Chemjobber business cards, a handwritten thank you note (by me) and a $10 Starbucks gift card:

Biotechtoreador's NMR description:"Stick your molecules in a tube, then stick the tube in a magnet so the dipoles in the atoms in the molecules line up. Turn on a radio, and the atoms sway to one side while dancing with each other. Turn off the radio and watch as the dipoles in the atoms dance back. Repeat until you can draw it yourself."

Anon071720151225PM: "NMR is the chemical equivalent of StoryCorps. Tune into the right frequency and you'll learn something about a specific situation that can also teach you something broad and fundamental about the environment in which it occurs.

NMR is like radio-frequency-based molecular Twitter. Hit your sample with one short, pointed "statement" on a given frequency and then sit back listen to all the related nuclear opinions that come back at you. Fair warning: lot of it will just be noise."

Anon071720151225PM: "Sum frequency generation, where a surface becomes a Thunderdome: two frequencies enter, one leaves."

Brandon Findlay:"Dr. Evil: Alright, here's the plan. Here's the plan. Back in the 60's, I had a mass spectrometry machine that used, in essence, a sophisticated laser beam which we called an "Ninja Assassin." Using these "Assassins," we superheat the sample of interest "Bound" to a base coating of aromatic compounds, which we scientists call "The Matrix." "Animating the Matrix" creates a superheated plume of gas containing every ion in the sample, a "Cloud Atlas" if you will. By timing the "Speed" at which ions "Race" to the detector we can determine their mass with incredible precision. "Reloading the Matrix" with new analyte allows the same detecting plate to be used multiple times, lading to massive profits and a "Matrix Revolutions" in mass spectrometry.

Scott: Why did you pluralize the word revolution and use so many air quotes?

Dr. Evil: It's a V, for Vendetta, not an air quote, Scott. Okay?

Scott: Huh?

Dr. Evil: Any ways, the key to this plan is controlling the rising gas. Like "Jupiter Ascending' it can quickly overload detector without proper safeguards. Because overall futuristic flair, and the polish source of "The Matrix", we shall call the device the Wachowski Starship.

Number Two: [pause] That also already been created. It's called MALDI-TOF.

Dr. Evil: Right, people you have to tell me these things, okay? I've been frozen for thirty years, okay? Throw me a frickin' bone here! I'm the boss! Need the info."

Peter Edwards:"IR is like a TV remote control. You shine an IR source (spectrometer or remote control) at your sample (chemical or TV), and the signal that you get in return doesn't usually tell you anything useful that you don't already know."

Molecular Geek:"FT spectroscopy is like listening to a grand piano crashing to the ground from a 10 story drop in order to determine which notes were out of tune."

qvxb:"GC/MS - Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry: A mixture of compounds and internal standards is injected into the gas chromatograph . The carrier gas sweeps the mixture over hot metal surfaces, where the compounds of interest degrade or rearrange, into a column where they are separated. Molecules that exit the column (i.e., those not pyrolyzed in the injection port) and enter the ion source of the MS, where they are bombarded by electrons and ionized to form one or more positive ions. These ions are separated by a mass filter (typically a quadrupole or quadruple after spell-check) and the relative intensities of each ion with a particular mass/charge ratio is determined by the data system. (Senior citizens will say computerized data system.)

The retention times of compounds may change as the stationary phase changes due to deposition of residues from dirty samples and reaction with oxygen from leaks. For compounds with similar mass spectra (e.g., xylenes) errors in identification may occur. This usually only happens when data are to be published or the sample is a PT sample."

SeeArrOh:"Sit down by the fire, kids, and let ol' See Arr Oh tell you about the spectral technique every O-chemist loves: Proton-decoupled carbon-13 NMR. You see, back in the 1950s, gents in well-tailored suits with big glasses posed next to giant, room-filling machines capable of only a fraction of today's tablet computers' power. These men - and they were always men, then - would place thin glass tubes of their molecule into relatively misshaped magnetic fields and send in specific radio waves, hoping out the other side to see their recorder pens transcribe a forest of little inky peaks.

Now, this worked fine if you wanted ALL the information about each and every proton in the molecule, but what if all you wanted to do was count carbons? Sending in radio waves tuned to carbon sent back little patterns of 2, 3, 4 (or more) peaks, depending on how many Hs were bound to each C. Too much info!

Instead, if you blast all the protons with one high-powered radio pulse, their coupling to C falls apart, and you can sneak in a carbon-only pulse just afterwards. Et voila! Simple, single peaks shifted to match the chemical environment of where you found 'em in the molecule. Carbons next to things that tug on their electrons are on your left. "Saturated" carbons with lots of protons or buried deep with other carbons are on your right. Easy as pie."

Unstable Isotope:"You put your precious sample in a complicated machine and out come lines of great meaning. (This applies to multiple spectroscopy techniques.)"

ForensicToxGuy:"Time of flight mass spectrometry is akin to a foot race between skinny kids and heavier kids. They all start approximately at the same starting line. The gun goes off and the race starts. The lighter kids travel faster and the heavier kids are slower through the race course. The skinnier kids get to the finish line first while the heavier kids finish later.

You take an irreplaceable archaeological artifact, smash it, pour acid on it, burn it, then catapult any remains as fast as current technology will allow."

standrewslynx:"NMR spectroscopy is like making love to a beautiful woman. You start vertical, but then get excited and end up horizontal. Then you roll around a few times...and relax."

Jon Lam:"So imagine you're a circus performer in a room, standing by the doorway. Your act consists of you holding a fairly large butterfly net, ready to catch what ever miniature clowns run through that doorway. But the mini clowns don't actually run in, they are actually being shot out of a cannon. Through the door. Into your net. But your cannon is kinda crappy so if the clown is too big, it just kinda plops out of the cannon and doesn't make it very far... Probably won't even make it through the doorway. But if the clowns are small, they get launched from the cannon with impressive speed... Probably too much speed so that when you try to catch them, they rip the net right out of your hands and keep going on their trajectory straight into the audience, perhaps into that section of nuns. It turns out, for the trick to work allowing the audience to see your daring clown capture, you need clowns of just the right size. Since you don't have a scale, the only way to find clowns of the right size is trial and error.

This is essentially how a magnetic sector mass spec instrument works."

Friend of the blog Josh Bloom sends a revised version of this job description to the inbox:

Director of Life Sciences (revised 8/20/15)

The American Council on Science and Health is looking for a Director of Life Sciences.

We are a 37-year old 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Our mission is to debunk junk science and medicine, especially as it pertains to public education and policymaking.

The ideal candidate will:

Have a Ph.D. in biology (required)

Experience in molecular biology is essential

Expertise in genetic modification is essential; (we routinely write about GM technology, and personalized medicine based on genetic markers...)

Microbiology is a plus

Have excellent writing, and communication skills

Be able to explain complex, technical issues to a broad audience

We are a small, but rapidly growing organization. This means so we all have responsibilities that are in addition to the our primary positions (editing, recruiting, and managing large projects, whatever it takes).

This is a full time position with benefits.

This is an in-office job. It will be necessary to work out of our office in Manhattan. On rare occasions, working from home will be appropriate. We are looking for a high energy, imaginative individual who will do whatever is necessary to help us grow. In return, you will have a challenging, exciting and fun job that will have you looking forward to getting to work in the morning.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

The silent ivory tower: First, she is absolutely right that the academic chemistry community has closed ranks. There have been few prominent chemists who have directly criticized either UCLA or Professor Harran. (From an online perspective, it's especially silent.) I don't run in academic circles anymore (not that I really ever did), so it's hard to say what kind of conversations about Prof. Harran's or UCLA's culpability have taken place during group meetings and the like.

New details on the incident: I'd like to hear more details that Prof. Harran asked her to perform the tBuLi syringing without the appropriate equipment (what equipment would that be? Certainly one could unpack a cannula and a graduate cylinder.) Personally, I think it's more likely that Prof. Harran asked her to do the syringe transfers and that he never thought that anything bad could have taken place.

Her interactions with the ACS Board: I am curious to hear about her interactions with the ACS Board of Directors to see if they'd make a public statement. How would someone even begin to pressure the board to act? E-mail? I can't imagine that they ever would have. They seem to shy away from that sort of controversy.

The policy proposal: Dr. Sangji believes that the ACS should advocate for the NIH to include an evaluation of a PI's safety record on funding proposals. While I agree that funding is certainly the only true coercive power that the NIH has over the universities, I repeat the same criticism of this potential policy that I have long made (when it was brought up by Beryl Benderly, back in 2009): How is it possible to accurately judge a PI's safety record? How do you get accurate data? How could you possibly avoid the inevitable sweeping under the rug of near-misses and actual safety incidents in order for professors, postdocs and students to continue to get funding? If I was a graduate student that had an accident and I knew that going to the emergency department for stitches meant that I'd be jeopardizing the future funding of my PI and my coworkers, I'd be sewing cuts up myself to avoid the potential damage to my career.

Apart from my policy critique, I believe that Dr. Sangji has a fundamental misunderstanding of the ACS and its relationship to the academic community. It's an organization that derives most of its Society-wide funding from ACS Publications, a publishing house which gets its work product, for free, in raw form from the academic community and then charges those same academics for access to its journals. Why would ACS ever decide to jeopardize this relationship over what is (in the ACS headquarters' eyes, I suspect) an internal employee safety dispute of its chief customer?

If there is one thing that I have learned over the past 6 years of watching the American Chemical Society attempt to deal with the mess that is chemist employment in the United States, it is this: it does not have tremendous power. While I wish that it held power over the chemical industry, it does not. While I wish it held power over academic chemistry, it does not. In fact, I would say that the only actual power it holds is its ability to extract revenue from universities via its subscriptions.*

To be sure, the ACS is an influential organization. However, how much sway does it have with NIH? Who does Francis Collins listen to more? ACS or the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology? Can anyone point to a single example in the last 10 years where the ACS has had any effect on governmental action at the state or federal level? (Maybe the federal Sustainable Chemistry Research and Development Act of 2015?)

Here's my suggestion for how Dr. Sangji could achieve her goals:

Influence Congress to pass a law mandating that graduate students are employees from an occupational safety perspective and

Get federal OSHA to place academic laboratory safety as one of its top enforcement priorities.

Pressing her sister's memory on each and every member of the American Chemical Society is tremendously important from a cultural perspective, but in this nation of laws, it's Congress that holds the true power.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Busy today, but I did want to take note that Dr. Naveen Sangji, the surviving sister of Sheharbano (Sheri) Sangji, gave a talk at ACS Boston on Monday. Rebecca Trager has thorough coverage in Chemistry World:

‘We still await an outcry from university scientists at the loss of the life of a young scientist,’ she added. ‘Where are the letters from the award-winning researchers and Nobel laureates condemning the university and the principal investigator (PI) for the deliberate disregard of safety?’

Naveen went on to reveal new details about the case, relaying Sheri’s remarks in the hospital that Harran had asked her to perform large-scale experiments without appropriate equipment, which was packed away in boxes. ‘Sheri stated quite clearly at the burn centre that Patrick Harran had explicitly instructed her to carry out three transfers of 50 cc of t-butyl lithium using a 60 cc syringe,’ Naveen said. As for her sister’s failure to wear a lab coat during the fatal experiment, Naveen said she was likely never issued such equipment.

In 2009, Naveen requested that the ACS Board make a public statement condemning Harran’s behaviour, which she claims includes destruction of evidence and refusal to make full disclosure. The organisation’s executive director and CEO at the time, Madeline Jacobs, declined to publicly comment on the matter. Naveen urged ACS’ current executive director and CEO, Thomas Connelly, to make such a statement, and go even further.

Specifically, she wants Connelly to write an open letter to the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, advocating for that a PI’s safety record be considered in the agency’s peer review process.

‘The ACS has tremendous power, and with that there is responsibility to protect the young scientist you hope to nurture,’ Naveen stated. ‘What the NIH adopts, other funding agencies will follow.’ She said that PIs are busy, and funding is chief among their priorities. ‘Tie funding and safety together, and change will happen overnight – future generations of scientists will be better protected than Sheri was,’ Naveen asserted.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

A very interesting little story coming out of the University of Missouri. Here's a snippet from the Columbia Daily Tribune (article by Megan Favignano):

Graduate students employed by the University of Missouri will have a harder time paying for health insurance after MU told students Friday it is taking away subsidies that help with premium costs.

MU Associate Vice Chancellor for Graduate Studies Leona Rubin said the change is the result of a recent IRS interpretation of a section of the Affordable Care Act. The law, which requires adults to have health insurance or face tax penalties, “prohibits businesses from providing employees subsidies specifically for the purpose of purchasing health insurance from individual market plans,” the university said in a letter sent to students Friday.

The IRS, Rubin said, considers the university’s student health insurance plan from Aetna an “individual market plan.” Because of the IRS classification, the university cannot give graduate students with assistantships a subsidy to help with health insurance costs, Rubin said.

If the university continued to do so, Rubin said it could be fined $36,000.

“We’re trying to comply with the interpretation of federal law,” Rubin said. “We’re not trying to hurt” students.

MU is using the $3.1 million it had budgeted for graduate student employee health insurance subsidies to create one-time fellowships for those employees. All graduate students with qualifying titles — a group that includes teaching assistantships, research assistantships and fellowships — will be eligible for the one-time fellowship this fall.
“We wanted to make sure the students who needed insurance had the money ... in the fall,” Rubin said.

In the spring, those students will have to pay completely out of pocket for health insurance....

I am told that the graduate students were given less than 24 hours notice of this change.

Suffice it to say this is an interesting and probably not desired outcome of the Affordable Care Act and one of the reasons that I am, in general, pretty skeptical of most federal legislative efforts. It's rare that anyone can accurately predict second- or third-order effects and it always seems like there will be small (or big) groups of people who are negatively affected by these massive legal and regulatory shifts.

I can't imagine that Mizzou chemistry grad students make much; I suspect this won't help their recruiting for the following year. (I suspect that they will be planning to increase their stipends for the following year?) Best wishes to the affected Mizzou students.

Below the jump, the text of the actual e-mail sent from Professor Rubin (formatting, etc. removed):

Monday, August 17, 2015

Within the bounds of respectfulness and privacy, I want to comment further (and briefly) on C&EN's recent layoff of eight production staff and reporters.

With today's issue, the Chemical and Engineering News masthead no longer has Sophie Rovner or Susan Ainsworth's names. This represents 67% of C&EN's reporters covering what I tend to call #chemjobs issues, with the third being the excellent, indefatigable Linda Wang. They have been doing a fantastic job covering the negative effects of the Great Recession on the ACS' member chemists.

I do not understand why this choice was made, but regardless of the reason, the effect is the same.

I sincerely hope that C&EN will continue to cover chemical employment issues with the same quality and quantity as they have before.

...Relying on foreign contractors is part and parcel of the business model of many of the “virtual” pharmaceutical research companies that have emerged in the past decade or so in the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world. Jay Wu, president and CEO of VM Discovery, in Fremont, Calif., says that not having labs helps to secure a more stable career path for his research managers.

“Being a lab researcher in California can be very depressing,” Wu says. Owing to their limited venture capital funding, most small biotech companies in California work on only one compound, and if that candidate fails to advance to clinical trials, as is usually the case, then everyone at the company is laid off. But if the compound beats the odds and succeeds in progressing to the clinical trial stage, the entire early discovery lab is laid off anyway. “Either way, most scientists are looking for work every three to five years,” he says.

By contrast, VM’s small overhead—largely the result of not needing to maintain lab space—enables the company to pursue at least five projects simultaneously. Compared with betting on a single candidate, the pursuit of multiple projects at once offers a much better chance of success, and that means everyone in the company—10 people or so, at the moment—can keep their jobs, Wu says. Currently, he notes, the company has a few candidates undergoing Phase II trials. VM develops oral drug candidates to treat central nervous system disorders, cancers, and other diseases. The firm relies on Chinese contractors to not only conduct laboratory work but also to manufacture small batches of its drug candidates for U.S. trials...

I don't work in the virtual space enough to understand how well this works out for companies; I guess it's about embracing the instability, sigh.

For a couple of years now, I have been involved with the DIY Science Zone at Geek Girl Con. This is an annual science fiction convention; prominent online science communicator Raychelle Burks has been putting on the Zone, where children (and adults) are invited to interact with hands-on science demonstrations and the like. It's a lot of fun and I have enjoyed participating in it.

We do a lot of fundraising for the Zone for supplies, etc. One of the things we're supposed to do is Acts of Whimsy when we meet certain fundraising goals. Because we reached $1500, I did a dramatic reading a portion of the infamous arsenic life paper.

A commenter noted that the reading was not exactly in the spirit of Geek Girl Con; I agreed and so I convinced someone I know to read a book that is much more relevant to the ideas behind Geek Girl Con and the DIY Sci Zone. The book is "Rosie Revere, Engineer" by Andrea Beaty.

CAMBRIDGE, Where Else? (Chemjobber News) It sounds like something out of Medicine Man, but it's true. In a study published today in the journal Science, researchers have announced the discovery of the "Holy Grail" of chemistry: a machine that eliminates bottlenecks.

Textbooks will need to be shredded as the research challenges the long-held notion that bottles require necks, or that any container requires a narrower opening.

"The findings truly are astounding," said lead author of the paper, Professor Jones. "It's taken a lot of hard work and long nights in the lab, but I'm glad that this work is finally out there. We have destroyed all known bottlenecks. They're gone. That Diet Coke bottle you had in your office? Get it within two feet of our machine and it'll be a cup. Aldrich 4 liter bottles are gonna be jars from here on out."

The scientists' work is a silver bullet for a problem known to many people around the globe who hate the "glug-glug" of pouring things and is the key to unlocking a mystery that paves the way for research in this emerging interdisciplinary field, namely how to possibly get funding in a 13% payline world.

The breakthrough is sure to be heralded as good news for managers who love to prattle on about "de-bottlenecking". But some will be asking questions about the need for this research in our increasingly open-top, all-access society.

Dr. Smith, who was not involved with the research, says that the results are "intriguing" but there is not yet enough information to draw any conclusions. "Surely Congress or the Pentagon has some bottlenecks remaining," he added.

I would like to see the distribution of overall employees at Intel - one presumes that they would be shifted to the left a bit, but I don't really know anything about semiconductor manucturing production/R&D to speculate on the median age of the workforce.

I don't seem to remember similar graphs coming out of the 2003-2013 period of layoffs in pharma - I wonder why?

Sure looks like the upper end of the age distribution took the biggest hit, though, doesn't it?

UPDATE: A commenter points out a portion of the article I meant to comment on:

This layoff skewed older – considerably so. The average age of an Intel employee in the United States is 42.6. The average age of an employee laid off last month was 48.1. Workers in their 50s were 1.7 times more likely to lose their job than the average worker overall; workers in their 60s were 2.7 times more likely to be laid off than the average. Meanwhile, workers in their 20s and 30s were considerably less likely to lose their jobs. Employment attorneys say this isn't unusual, and it could be difficult to make a discrimination case in court."

I gotta check out some more of the literature around this issue, see if there's more chemistry/pharma-relevant stuff.

Juneau, AK: NOAA is looking for a chemist to "lead original research in trophic structuring and energy flow through large marine ecosystems using chromatographic methods such as isotope
mass ratio, lipid class and fatty acid analysis." Yeah, that.

...But the FDA’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion has ruled in a warning later dated last Friday, August 7, that those URLs were insufficient and inconsistent with the full material information required when such a drug is advertised in any medium. It turns out that this wasn’t just a happy celebrity sharing her health tips with her 40.8 million closest friends (the post alone received 464,000 likes).

The OPDP became involved because the post was a paid endorsement to Kardashian West by the drug’s maker and, as required, had been submitted in advance to the Office for review. And as a piece of trivia, I believe this is the first time that an FDA warning letter has contained the acronym OMG...

Glad to see that FDA is on the case.

(One presumes that this was really the corporation and her social media underlings that screwed up.)

(For those of you who do not haunt Chinatowns on a regular basis, Ten Ren is a tea store chain. I've spent a few bucks in at the one in Chicago on Wentworth Avenue.)

*This feature of the regulatory state (give the okay to one specific molecule that only major multinational conglomerates can produce/purchase, disallow the extract) is a less than wonderful aspect, I think. That said, I can see the risk analysis (this molecule is okay, who knows about that whole leaf?) behind their thinking.

Applications are invited for a full-time research position in the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Fellowship Program at the Division of Vector-Borne Diseases (DVBD), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Fort Collins, Colorado. The individual will participate in a broad range of laboratory activities related to the study of Lyme disease with a specific focus on the discovery of metabolic biomarkers for various stages of this infection and treatment response. This work will require handling human specimens including serum and urine, extensive computer analysis using complex software programs and the use of mass spectrometry.

The selected individual should be able to perform the design and execution of experiments; the proper recording and reporting of experimental data; the writing of draft research manuscripts; and the presentation of data at scientific meetings.

Qualifications:

The individual in this position must have a Ph.D. or equivalent in the fields of infectious diseases, microbiology, biochemistry or chemistry. The selected individual will receive training in all procedures involved in the work. However, previous experience working on Lyme disease, metabolomic approaches or mass spectrometry is preferable.

This is a fellow position with initial appointment for one year and an annual stipend not to exceed $62,850 depending on education and experience. Extensions for additional periods may be made not to exceed a total of 4 years. The individual may be a U.S. citizen or a non-citizen with an appropriate visa.

Requested start date is September 20th, 2015. Please apply for this position at the following ORISE webpage: http://orise.orau.gov/cdc/default.html under current research opportunities.

Wooster, OH: The College of Wooster is looking for two assistant professors of analytical and inorganic chemistry ("Applicants with experience and interest in polymers, organometallics, or mass spectrometry, and those who can contribute toward the College’s Environmental Studies Program, are particularly encouraged to apply.")

Tucson, AZ: Interesting bioanalytical position at Arizona's "Center for Integrative Medicine." It's part-time at the moment for $27,500.00, to be doubled to 55,000.00 pending funding. Ummmmmmm.

Monday, August 10, 2015

John Spevacek has a good one on acroosteolysis, a disease that would afflict those chemical operators who were assigned the manual cleaning of vessels used to make PVC:

The disease was observed for the first time in mid-1963 in Belgium (Jemeppe) in a chemical plant operated by Solvay, and affected two workers whose job was the manual cleaning of vessels used for the polymerization of vinyl chloride; similar cases occurred in almost all PVC production plants all over the world, but not in the plants where the main activity was the production of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM).

Little more than one hundred cases are described in the scientific literature, and this number increases by a few dozen if we consider known but unpublished cases. These figures confirm the rarity of the disease, which peaked at the end of the 1960's and disappeared during the 1970's, probably due to the complete elimination of manual reactor cleaning. Observation of the disease lasted no more than fifteen years and the disease was not replicated in experimental conditions on animals.

I think the "horses not zebras" explanation would be one of the additives used in PVC production. But I sure would like to know what level PPE those operators were using, and what gas-phase compounds they were exposed to...

“Making Legal Marijuana Safe” outlined many issues with the current extraction solvent known as butane hash oil (BHO) (C&EN, April 20, page 27). This method requires a large up-front investment in closed-loop, high-pressure systems to contain and recover solvents. Safety concerns include explosion and fire risks for workers.

The article then proposes a new extraction system using the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Although this CO2 extraction process seems to be a viable alternative, it only modestly shifts the safety risk from explosion to asphyxiation while doing nothing to eliminate the hazards of keeping gases under high pressure. Extraction by CO2 will still require closed-loop systems and large up-front capital investment to produce the desired extracts.

A new Seattle-based company called BT Ingenuity has tackled the extraction process using a green chemistry approach. The company, founded by ACS member and ACS Medicinal Chemistry Fellow Tyrell Towle, uses a solvent that is ­biodegradable, does not bioaccumulate, and is nontoxic. The patented process does not require a closed-loop system and requires only minimal postextraction processing using Food & Drug Administration-approved ingredients. This new process eliminates the risk of both fire and asphyxiation for workers. It is highly versatile and provides control over the finished product. Finally, the solvent is recovered and can be reused in multiple extractions.

The legal marijuana market will only continue to increase, and improved safety as well as green production processes will continue to be important for both producers and consumers. Innovative thinking will allow the industry to dramatically improve safety.

Secondly, I think it's interesting that Dr. Towle is quite young. I wonder how many young people are getting into the cannabis industry because of the relative lack of employment opportunities in more traditional arenas of chemistry? Also, undoubtedly, there is money to be made there. Developing...